The Blank in the 2026 Intake Figures: International Students Top 1,000 — Where Did the Mainland Number Go?

A 1,131-character intake press release reports figures for international students, exchange students, and local students — but not one figure for mainland students. It says only that the intake "also spans mainland China" among other places. Three weeks before the release went out, the Hong Kong government had just raised the non-local student quota cap for the eight UGC-funded universities from 40% to 50%.

One-line summary: City University of Hong Kong (CityU)'s 1 September 2026 intake press release reports that international students topped 1,000^※ (a near-decade high), exchange students numbered close to 700^※, and local students exceeded 3,000^※ — but nowhere in the release does a figure or share appear for mainland students.

# What Figures Does the Press Release Actually Give?

CityU held its university-wide welcome ceremony on 28 August 2026, where Acting President Li Zhensheng (李振聲), together with senior management and the deans of each faculty, welcomed more than a thousand new students^※. In the press release the University issued on 1 September, this year's intake is broken into three figures: "the number of international students admitted this academic year has topped 1,000, a near-decade high^※; together with close to 700 international exchange students^※ and more than 3,000 local students^※, this further enriches CityU's diverse, internationalised campus."

These three figures hold up under verification: cross-checking the full text as reprinted by Wen Wei Po against two independent WebSearch summaries, the three numbers — 1,000+ international students, close to 700 exchange students, more than 3,000 local students — matched exactly. The release also gives further detail on internationalisation: CityU has been ranked "the world's most international university" by Times Higher Education for three consecutive years (2024 to 2026)^※; Acting President Li Zhensheng said in his address that "CityU brings together teaching and research staff from more than 40 countries and students from close to 100 countries." Council Chairman Wei Mingde (魏明德) was quoted specifically on the Kazakhstani cohort: "CityU currently has more than 200 students from Kazakhstan, including more than 90 new students this year."

The blank in the table's last row is exactly what this article sets out to verify: of these five categories, the first four each have a definite figure attached, while the mainland-student line — which should by rights be the longest — goes entirely unmentioned in the release.

# What Does "Mainland" Actually Refer to in the Release?

The release does not avoid the word "mainland" entirely. It states that this year's intake "also spans mainland China, countries along the Belt and Road, Southeast Asia and Central Asia, including Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Vietnam and Egypt^※." This sentence places "mainland" alongside Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan and others in a geographic list — its function is to illustrate the diversity of source regions, not to report a statistical breakdown. Nowhere else in the release does the word "mainland" appear again, and there is no sentence of the form "X mainland students" or "mainland students account for X%."

This contrasts directly with how the release treats Kazakhstan: Kazakhstani students are singled out with a figure precise to the unit — "more than 200, including more than 90 new students this year" — and given a full paragraph of dedicated remarks from the Council Chairman. Mainland China, the first item on the source-region list, does not even get an approximate figure. A release built around an internationalisation narrative mentions the mainland within the context of "international sources" but assigns it no corresponding statistical position. This is the concrete shape of the "blank" named in this article's title: it is not that the word "mainland" is missing, but that the number attached to it is.

# Why Withhold the Figure at This Particular Moment?

The press release was published on 1 September 2026. A little over three weeks earlier, the 2025 Policy Address, published on 17 September 2025^※, had announced a key policy: "starting from the 2026/27 academic year, the cap on the number of self-funded non-local students at each UGC-funded post-secondary institution, expressed as a percentage of local UGC-funded places, will rise from 40% to 50%^※." The government also stated that it would "maintain 15,000 UGC-funded places for local students each year^※" unchanged.

This is already the second step in the current round of expansion. The first step came in the 2023 Policy Address, which raised the non-local-student cap for the eight UGC-funded universities from 20% to 40%, effective the following academic year (2024/25)^※. In that report, CityU explicitly voiced support for the higher cap, on the grounds that "its programmes are popular with non-local students, and the number of applicants each year far exceeds the number admitted^※" — one of the University's few public statements on non-local student policy, and one that welcomes expansion rather than treating it with caution.

Set against this timeline, CityU's press release — reporting internationalisation but not the mainland figure — falls precisely in the window just after the government again raised the non-local student cap. CityU's overall non-local applications this academic year rose by roughly 30% on the previous year^※, and both total applications and Band A first-choice applications ranked first among Hong Kong's eight UGC-funded universities^※. The release's choice to frame this year's intake around "internationalisation" rather than "mainlandisation" is consistent with the broader picture of a university moving to expand its non-local intake following the policy loosening, while continuing to position itself publicly as "the world's most international university" — but this is only a temporal coincidence, and this article does not speculate about the University's communication intent.

# Can CityU's Mainland-Student Figure Be Found in Official UGC Statistics?

This is the question this article most wants to verify: if CityU's own press release does not say, can the figure be found in official statistics published by the Education Bureau or the University Grants Committee (UGC)? The answer has two layers: the aggregate figure is available; a CityU-specific figure is not.

At the aggregate level, UGC data shows that across the eight universities, the number of non-local students rose 31.8% to 21,709 between 2016/17 and 2022/23, of whom 16,229 were mainland students — a 74.8% share^※. This figure confirms that mainland students have long made up the overwhelming majority of non-local students across Hong Kong, but it is a combined total for all eight institutions and reveals nothing about CityU's individual share.

The problem appears at the institution level. In a supplementary paper the Education Bureau submitted to the Legislative Council for 2024/25, the eight universities' undergraduate non-local students totalled 17,161, or 23.2% of local UGC-funded places — HK01 used this paper to compile individual non-local student numbers and shares for six universities: HKU, PolyU, Lingnan, Baptist University, CUHK and the Education University^※. Checking that report sentence by sentence, no sentence pairs "CityU" with a corresponding figure in the six-university list. The report does not explain why, and this article does not speculate as to why CityU is absent from either the report or the underlying document — it simply presents, as a verifiable layout fact, that six universities have a figure and CityU does not.

A separate independent outlet, Photon Media, ran a year-on-year, institution-by-institution analysis of the same UGC data and produced an indirect but real CityU figure: "City University saw the largest rise in the share of Chinese students admitted, up sharply by 9 percentage points in 2024/25 over the previous year^※," followed by Baptist University with a 5.5-point rise^※. This figure confirms two things. First, the underlying UGC data does contain institution-level breakdowns for CityU — otherwise Photon Media could not have calculated this 9-point rise. Second, the figure remains incomplete: it gives only the size of the change, not the base number it is calculated from, so a reader still cannot work out CityU's actual number of mainland students for 2024/25.

So does institution-level raw data exist at all? An official written reply the Education Bureau gave the Legislative Council on "implementing the higher non-local student quota" confirms an appendix, broken down by institution, titled "Number of Local and Non-Local Students in UGC-Funded Programmes, 2023/24"^※. I attempted to parse this appendix PDF directly, but the file is a mixed image-and-text format, and the extraction tool could not pull readable table text from it. This means the institution-level data is not entirely absent — it exists in the form of a government document appendix, but has not been transcribed into any publicly readable table I was able to verify and open. The more precise description of the "unavailable" CityU mainland-student figure is "no verifiable public source has transcribed it into a readable number," not "the Education Bureau has never compiled this data." This distinction matters: this article does not equate a technical accessibility gap with deliberate concealment by the University or the government.

# Can the UGC's Own Public Database Yield CityU's Figure Directly?

The UGC maintains a public data platform called the CDCF (Central Data Collection Framework), officially described as providing "a customisable query interface for statistics on UGC-funded universities." I attempted to use this platform's query interface to retrieve CityU's historical student numbers broken down by source region, but the statistics query page is an interactive form that requires selecting university, academic year and statistical dimension before submitting a query — not a static page whose text can be pulled directly. My retrieval tools could not submit the form parameters or parse a returned result. Hong Kong's open-data portal, data.gov.hk, also hosts a dataset titled "Student Enrolment of UGC-funded Programmes by University, Level of Study, Place of Origin and Mode of Study," whose title corresponds exactly, on its face, to this by-institution, by-source-region cross-section, and which ought to contain CityU's mainland-student figures by year. But this dataset is offered on the data.gov.hk catalogue page as a Spatial Data Format API; opening the corresponding link did not yield a directly readable table file. This attempt, too, was stopped by the platform's technical access method rather than by any absence of content.

Taken together, these attempts point to one thing: the more precise description of the "unavailable" CityU mainland-student figure is that "the UGC and the government evidently have the capacity, and in all likelihood the willingness, to maintain this institution-level statistical breakdown, but none of the public-facing presentation layers — whether the CDCF's interactive query tool, the data.gov.hk API dataset, or the Legislative Council document's PDF appendix — has converted it into a readable table I could directly verify and open." This is a broader observation about the transparency of Hong Kong higher-education statistics, not a CityU-specific case alone. Another article on this site discusses how CityU's own "total enrolment" figure exists in three mutually inconsistent versions — the UGC basis, the commonly cited basis, and the THE full-time-equivalent basis — see 〈CityU Enrolment Over the Years: Key Figures and FAQ〉. The two articles point to the same underlying problem: the existence of public data and the readability of public data are two different things.

# Is CityU a Unique Exception, or Is HKUST the Same?

The table above shows that CityU is not the only university left out of HK01's list — HKUST is likewise absent from that report's table. This suggests the finding here may not be a "CityU exception" at all, but rather an artefact of how this particular Education Bureau supplementary paper, or this particular report, chose to present the data: the document itself, or the reporter's editorial choices, tend to list the universities with the highest shares or the most notable changes (HKU and PolyU are consistently at or near the cap; the Education University and Lingnan show striking rises), while universities with non-local shares in the middle range, beyond HKU and PolyU (CityU and HKUST), are not itemised individually. In other words, this looks more like selective presentation by the media than any treatment specific to CityU. Even so, the outcome remains the same: as of the completion of this research, CityU's specific mainland-student number and share are absent from every public source I was able to verify and open, whether the reason is that the government document itself does not list every institution or that the media did not transcribe every one.

One further distinction is worth making here: not every mainland-related admissions figure is withheld. From 2026, mainland undergraduate admissions have moved to "independent admission via the gaokao^※" (the gaokao being mainland China's national university entrance exam) — not part of the "National Unified College Entrance Examination Admission Plan," and not counted against gaokao application quotas^※, with no fixed minimum or maximum place allocation by province or municipality^※. CityU is in fact quite specific about the rule details of this reform, the roughly 300-strong scale of the previous unified-admission channel, and its tiered scholarships, in the admissions channel aimed at mainland gaokao candidates — see this module's article 〈From the Jockey Club Scholarship to "Independent Admission"〉 for the full historical development. In other words, the "blank" in the mainland-student figure occurs specifically in the narrative of this year's intake cohort's overall composition at the welcome ceremony, not in the policy details of mainland admissions itself. CityU is willing to publish its admission rules, but has not, in the public-facing setting of an intake press release, placed a mainland-student figure into that "1,000 / 700 / 3,000" population list.

# Setting the Mainland Gap Aside, Where Does CityU Stand on Non-Local Numbers Overall?

Setting the specific mainland-student gap aside and placing CityU within the overall picture of non-local expansion, its posture is one of active growth rather than cautious observation. CityU's overall non-local applications this academic year rose by roughly 30% on the previous year^※, and both total applications and Band A first-choice applications ranked first among Hong Kong's eight universities^※; combined with Photon Media's finding that "the year-on-year rise in the share of Chinese students admitted was the largest of the eight, at 9 percentage points," these two figures together sketch a university expanding its non-local intake faster than its peers. But this pace of expansion can currently only be read from relative figures — the size of a share change, the rate of application growth — and lacks an absolute headcount baseline that could be tracked year over year or compared directly across institutions.

This tension is clearer against the policy backdrop: the non-local student cap has now been raised, step by step, from 20% to 50%, and reports citing sources say 50% is a ceiling rather than a mandatory target, with each university free to adjust towards it at its own pace^※. The public narrative CityU chose for its intake release — reporting an absolute figure for internationalisation but not for "mainlandisation" — falls precisely within this policy gap, where the cap has been loosened and each institution decides its own disclosure basis. This does not necessarily mean CityU is deliberately avoiding the figure; it may simply continue a long-standing convention in how these releases are written. This article's position is to lay out this coincidence of facts and leave the specific motive to the reader's own judgement, without reaching a conclusion.

# FAQ

Q: Is there a rough estimate of what share of CityU's non-local students are from the mainland? There is no reliable figure with a source I can verify. At the aggregate level, mainland students accounted for 74.8% of all non-local students across the eight universities in 2022/23^※, but this is a combined share for all eight institutions, and applying it directly to CityU would mean extrapolating from the whole to a single part. This article does not adopt that kind of extrapolation; it presents only the fact that a CityU-specific figure is genuinely unavailable.

Q: Why not simply check CityU's own Facts and Figures page? I tried. The relevant CityU webpages — including the original Chinese and English versions of the intake press release and the Facts & Figures statistics page — are all front-end, dynamically rendered pages. Two attempts with the WebFetch tool returned blank content, and one further attempt via a proxy returned a 401 error. This article instead uses Wen Wei Po's byline reprint of the full release ("Hong Kong Wen Wei Po report, by reporter Gao Yu (高鈺)") as a verifiable alternative version, cross-checked against independent searches to confirm the figures matched.

Q: Has CityU been instructed not to disclose its mainland-student figure? I found no public source supporting this suggestion, and no public source explicitly denying it either. The scope of this article's verification is limited to the factual question of whether a specific CityU mainland-student figure exists in public, verifiable sources as of the completion of this research. It makes no judgement, and implies none, about whether the University or the government has any particular intent.

Q: Does the release's "more than 3,000 local students" include postgraduates? The original release does not specify. This is another blank in the release's own statistical basis — as with the "international students" and "international exchange students" figures, it is not stated whether the scope covers undergraduates, postgraduates, or both combined. This article presents that fact as it stands, without speculative completion.

# In One Line

Setting this press release alongside the 2025 Policy Address, the Education Bureau's Legislative Council paper, and independent media data analysis, only one fact can be confirmed: CityU's specific mainland-student number has no citable figure in any public channel I was able to verify. It is not denied outright anywhere; it is simply absent, layer after layer, across the press release, the government appendix, and media reporting. This "blank" occurs in the same window as the newly loosened non-local student cap and CityU's own rapidly growing non-local applications — and that coincidence is the full extent of what this article can establish. Whether it reflects convention, oversight, or strategy is left for more complete public data to answer in future.

# Further Reading

• From the Jockey Club Scholarship to "Independent Admission": Twenty-Seven Years of CityU's Mainland Undergraduate Admissions — the full historical arc of CityU's mainland admissions system, not repeated here.
• Language Environment and the "Mainlandisation" Debate: Multicultural Discourse at Hong Kong Universities — the broader debate over non-local student quota policy and "internationalisation vs. mainlandisation" discourse.
• City University of Hong Kong Non-Local Admissions (Mainland Gaokao, International Students, the 2026 Shift to Independent Admission) — admissions details of the 2026 independent-admission mechanism.
• CityU Enrolment Over the Years: Key Figures and FAQ — the three-way pitfall in CityU's total enrolment figures, the same category of statistical-transparency problem as this article's "figure blank."